Finding Your Voice as a Writer

How Fiction Writers Can Develop a Unique Voice

May 7, 2008 Helen Brain

A Unique voice is essential if you want to succeed as a writer. Ways to make your voice stronger.

What Is a Voice?

A writer’s voice is the element that you recognize when you read an anonymous extract from their writing and can tell who wrote it. It’s the same as switching on the radio and being able to tell the name of a singer even if you’ve never heard that song before. Voice is something that grows and evolves as the person matures.

How Do Writers Develop their Voice?

Writers develop their voice in different ways – by reading, by writing, by listening to the inner storyteller and blocking out other voices that criticize or correct the storyteller voice. But most of all they develop their voice by knowing themselves.

Know Yourself

When you have uncovered the layers of your own personality, when you understand what drives you, why you behave in certain ways and have particular habits and foibles, when you feel comfortable in your own skin and have accepted yourself, good side and shadow side, your voice will be confident.

You will treat your voice with respect and have the self-confidence to express yourself without toning it down for fear that people will laugh at you or reject you. You will also lose the urge to exaggerate for effect, or the need to imitate other writers who you believe are better than you.

Read Read Read

When you read a book because you love it, go back and re-read it again and again, something of the style gets absorbed into your own creative process. Your voice is made up partly of an amalgamation of the writers you have read and the storytellers you have listened to. For example, Margaret Mahy read a lot of poetry, and used to talk in rhyming couplets just for the fun of it. This has become part of her voice, and readers love her bouncy lively word play, which is her interpretation of the poetry she enjoys.

Listen to the Inner Storyteller

The Inner Storyteller dictates your story to you. It’s the voice we all have in childhood as we play imaginatively, but most people lose it as they grow up. It could be described as the creative right brain voice telling you what to write. Learning to listen to your own storyteller is a skill you pick up again with practice.

Most people find that the critical, logical left-brain interferes with the process of writing, picking you out for bad spelling or grammar, or telling you you can’t say this or that.

Allow the Right Brain to Speak

It’s important when writing a first draft to quieten the left-brain so the right-brain can create something uniquely your own. You can do this by writing with your non-dominant hand, or by hanging a cloth over the computer monitor, so that your left-brain can’t intrude in the writing process. The left-brain will be used in the second and subsequent drafts as you rewrite and edit. But for the first draft the right-brain needs to be dominant. You can read more about this in Betty Edward’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

The copyright of the article Finding Your Voice as a Writer in Writing for Children is owned by Helen Brain. Permission to republish Finding Your Voice as a Writer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.